The Web and Our Spiritual Lives

Introduction: What the Web Means for Our Spiritual Lives

• A Facebook account was created the summer after graduating high school out of desire to connect with friends.
• Compulsively checking the app became a habit that took over a large amount of time.
• The account, created in 2007, started a way of living that was completely foreign.
• Online activity became consistent, regular, and habitual, integrated with normal life activities
• Digital technologies have shifted from exciting innovations to things people desperately try to escape.
• The relationship with digital technology is about more than just time spent and is about how technologies shape and mold people.
• It raises questions about humanity, God's image, and lives mediated by screens and algorithms.
• There is a concern about whether the internet is making us less humane.

What's Water?

• In 2005, David Foster Wallace gave a commencement address at Kenyon College and told a fable about fish who don't recognize the water they swim in.
• The most obvious and important realities are often the hardest to see and talk about.
• People take what they are immersed in for granted.
• Learning to think involves exercising control over how and what you think and choosing how to construct meaning from experience.

This Is Water

• The social internet has come to dominate and reorient lives.
• This makes it difficult to understand its effects on emotions, values, and worldviews.
• Young people may not remember life before social media, while older people may not grasp its immersive effect on younger generations.
• The omnipresence of digital technology can obscure its nature.
• The social internet blends seamlessly into daily life and may bring an ideology or value system into lives without people realizing it.
• The emerging generation of Western adults belongs to the spirit of "expressive individualism".
• Robert Bellah defined it as each person having a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.
• Many people believe that happiness and fulfillment come from arranging things to achieve inner desires and ambitions.
• Trevin Wax describes this worldview as the call to "look in" to find meaning in life by peering inside your own wants and sense of self.
• The key is to discover who you truly are, find what makes you unique, and take hold of your authentic self.
• Expressive individualism is a quintessential secular creed found in music, films, education, parenting, and religion.
• Expressive individualism is part of the "water" that surrounds modern people, often unnoticed because it is all they know.
• The digital technology revolution has provided the revolution of expressive individualism with its most important, enchanting, and effective vehicle.

The Internet

• Version known today is a very recent development, from the 1990s and commercial internet is known as the World Wide Web.
• 21% of Americans used internet technology in the past three months in 1997 and 75% in 2007.
• By 2018, over 85% of Americans (about 250 million people) used internet technology semiregularly.
• 85% of US adults report being online every day, and about a third say they are online "almost constantly".
• The internet has shifted from a hobby to a routine for the majority in about 20 years.
• Industries are now centered around the internet, requiring constant access to email, videoconferencing, file hosting, and social media.
• Many employed people spend most of their workday, breaks, and free time online.
• It's increasingly common to experience guilt over excessive TV or social media use, but this is not unusual in the modern world.
• The screen is mediating much of modern life, from work to relationships to entertainment.
• The web is the water people live in, and expressive individualism is the chlorine that permeates it.
• The internet is like pornography, and its very nature is pornographic in its essence.
• Christians tend to focus on what the internet provides instead of what it is.
• While much attention has been given to the dangers of online pornography, less attention has been given to how the form of the web shapes people.
• The web is a tool that responds to its users' desires, but also shapes people by dialogue.
• It is a liturgical environment, shaping views, and is deeply spiritual, shaping desires
• Even allegedly "nonreligious" spaces are deeply spiritual, telling a story about the good life.
• The web's disembodied, fragmented nature is a fundamental part of the story it tells.
• The form of the internet has radically altered how we read, think, feel, and believe.
• The digital liturgies of the web and social media train people to invest ultimate authority in their own stories and experiences
• It separates them from the objective givenness of the embodied world.
• The form of the web undermines moral reconciliation, contributing to online shaming.
• Digital liturgies are not neutral, theological, philosophical, existential, and moral stories that leave constant impressions and are soul-shaping narratives.

The Gospel's Analog Truth

• Being a Christian provides stability in a restless age and provides a completely trustworthy word from the Creator of the universe.
• The Bible provides the grand narrative and the gospel of Jesus to give meaning and direction.
• Christians should cling to the meaning they've been given, instead of constructing meaning from experience.
• Digital liturgies preach every day, but the gospel is wonderfully satisfying analog truth.
• Analog truth refers to the gospel being rooted deeply in physical reality.
• God preserved the good news of Jesus in a physical book, inspiring humans to write physical words through the Holy Spirit.
• The book tells a unified story about God, who was incarnated as a real human being to save people from sin and self-obsession.
• God will one day raise people up, body and soul, to live forever with him.
• Putting digital liturgies up against the analog truth of the gospel reveals how flimsy and unsatisfying the spirit of the web age really is.
• The internet, web, social media refer to the same thing unless otherwise stated.
• This refers to the disembodied electronic environment we enter through connected devices.
• The text will not argue that Christians should stay off the internet.
• The text will not attempt to tell its readers to permanently unplug and go "off the grid" in order to be good Christians.
• Jesus prayed for his disciples to be preserved by God's truth, not taken out of the world.
• Identifying how the web shapes us enables more deliberate, wise, and Christian use of technologies.
• The author's life has been a struggle to reclaim time, attention, and affection from online existence.
• The formative power of the web matters because it has been personally experienced.
• It has changed the way that people read and think and how the web has dominated lives.
• It has shifted how opinions are formed, how relationships are related to those who disagree, and how people invest time.
• There's a sense that the truths of Scripture feel foolish or implausible because of online proliferation of the ideas and memes and mentalities.
• God-fearing people can become deeply foolish because of petty controversies, cheap outrage, and minute arguments.
• A digital liturgy has often taken root in those problems.
• The text is a story about technology and worship.

Truth and Technology

• As people have the tendency to articulate effects of online world because small amount have baseline standard for comparing human flourshing.
• People must start be aware of truth starts with God while speaking of power of online technology
• World thoroughly, is a "tech maximalist" place
• Much of digital technology was created to help humans transcend and achieve more
• Christianity contradicts narrative as Bible sees meaning and purpose is see self is not self-made but created
• Reality has objective nature that humans must conform to in order to live whole and well
• The response to reality is called wisdom by Bible
• Christian Scripture is wisdom, embodied, but easily hidden by digital world
• What is wisdom and what does it consist of and how can digital tech challenge with this?
• Scripture offers ways of living through gospel liturgy

Embodied Wisdom in a Faceless Age

• There are astronauts in black recesses and space stations that communicate nearly silently
• They use screens similar to televisions to interact with family far away
• Video calls are clear with near-instant audio and brief conversation, then they are planets apart
• It sounds like it can be day in 21st century, but the scene in one of the early scenes in science-fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• The film has director Stanley Kubrick with a story by novelist Arthur C Clarke.
• However, audience realized it was visual effects with a man punch few buttons to watch daughter is just make-believe
• Today movie becomes a cheap dream from pocket or charge as bedside and today work to church dependent what once movie magic
• Even when things break down, people get frustrated
• There are psychological tics that make person thinks futuristic machines talking to us when really not
• It’s astonishing that movie magic from sixty years ago becomes routine
• People are unable to comprehend technology because of lack of category
• It create Inability where the revolution and emotion and cultural is spiritual
• People respond just to buy versions stream newest platform
• There is a community with these screens
• People believe what people tell us
• HAL 900 computer represents that technology gets of hand.
• Kubicks and Clarke imagine a world where humanity becomes inhumane.
• People that lack sophistication are missing something that bible teaches them
• Wisdom is ability to make correct decisions
• Wisdom has multiple definitions, like " "wisdom of the crowd", and some take it as relative concept
• Christian wisdom is living with holistic.
• Christian scripture describes biblical wisdom having skill practical living ethical, and fearing God.

Objectiveness of Living

• Objectiveness is living response to objective realities in world.
• Wisdom can be vocational in personal relational
• Can discern the course if in puzzling situation.
• Other people find it unfit as they don't understand
• Wise person can "read the room" by looking past surface appearance.
• Wisdom can backfire becuase they are slave to impulses
• Those in deep trouble live reality

Additional Pointers

• Wisdom doesn't stop with emotional intelligence with virtue.
• Standards of universe if person must live light.
• People use philosophy as talk misguided by people as despot with those thinking to annalize ethics
• Objective with wrong interweaved
• Cannot become fully human without objective standards
• Is the level of theological level

More on Wisdom

• Wisdom is fear of everything from lords
• Wisdom look at loyalty of the person.
• Stand to create people's continued existence
• God is the person there isn't a reasonable response
• Every humans try inventing reality for them to be liberated or conform
• Idols begin and they destort
• Some craft tools and it distort God's reality is able to send
• Cosmic is that technology matters and shapes those ways